The Outsourcing Of Eldercare To Migrant Women: Who Decides And What The Circumstances Are

The union between care and women and the fact that it is a social reality in continuous change makes it a strategic field from which to analyze the implications that the socio-economic and cultural transformations have in the existing gender system. Thus the crisis of care is what shows the crisis of the current gender system on which patriarchal society is based and the reproduction of human life is organized. In this context, families have developed strategies to address the care, being one of them to outsource part of the caring tasks in the home by hiring migrant women. With this research we aim to explore how the hiring of a migrant woman for the care of an elderly person takes place in the homes of Avila. For this purpose an ethnographic approach has been carried out to achieve the object of this study, taking as a unit of observation the contracting households and as a geographic field of study the province of Avila. The technique used to collect the information has been in-depth interview. Fifteen people who have hired immigrant women to care for their elderly have been interviewed. We have sought the variability of men and women, the rural or urban context and whether the caregivers, Latin American immigrants, cared full-time or part time. The results indicate that the decision to hire a woman to care for the elder person usually occurs after a deterioration or change in the status and health of the elderly, whether at physical, psychological or social level. The decision to hire is taken mainly by the daughters, showing that this area is considered as something typical of women, to which it is allocated as its own task. It is concluded that the modality of the contracting is very influenced by the greater or less degree of dependence of the elder, that lives alone or accompanied and that resides in urban or rural zone. Hiring a migrant woman is a strategy within a broader range of strategies that the family progressively uses to address the care of a dependent person.